posts regarding experiences of nature, internal and external, while running or painting or music. . . . . or a collection of ramblings by a painter who runs. (All rights of content reserved by author.)

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Rant & Pant, WRRC Survival Run 2011.

Sartre chokes on his own smoky words while Vegh String Quartet saws and hacks Beethoven’s Grand Fugue, opus 133. Now considered a canon of string chamber music, the piece was initially rejected and ridiculed, forcing a re-composing of the fourth movement. Wonderful irony of histories.
************************************************Lately, while running, i've been aware of my degrees of spirituality as I attempt to judge whether ego is consuming my runs. And during a 12 miler at greenfield park last Thursday, the source of my ire revealed itself: the materialism of running, the culturally dominated aspects of the runner, the classic external definitions of what a runner is, that is to say, the cultural ego pressing me into paces that steal the landscape, steal the joy, steal the deeper momentum of a run. I have unearthed my mythologies, exposing them like earthworms to the sun: the body type, the clothing, the pacing, the jaw and thighs and attitude and all of the demands society makes on even the most beautifully solitary of Acts (not so unrelated to the Act of painting or drawing or writing). anyway, running claims no ego, and no ego drives me other than the fact that i think running makes me a better person, mellows out my temper and stabilizes my mood as any meditation may. Unfortunately my creative ego struggles against bloated senses of self, and that is why the image-repertoire is currently barren and rocky, like an aesthetic object devoid of use. But below is the rant that ensued after the run.

Billboard Life: From Beauty to Banal. . . and sometimes it is the materialism that gets you, that removes you from the Core, depletes the Passion, gets you into the Label and the newest new, the most progressive progressions, swipes the ideal of a moment, robs the momentum & loses the meaning. the pure Act becomes mired beneath peripheral aspects, against marketing plots, the collective sheep-song of consumerism. or the beauty of a thing becomes an obsession, a demise of itself, a self-devouring Bosch-form. . . the dreadful neurotic race that everything becomes. Decay of american passions. Guerilla capitalism. Van gogh’s delirium. How something beautiful becomes a commercial exploit, a bark for power, an angle into profit: magazines stuffed with advertisements, marketing-strategy essays on dead artists (profiting living dealers), commercialized & mass-market painting (the Global Image), the namebrand artist or the omniscient namebrand society. airbrushed runners on glossed covers, uberman mythologies embedded in every article, the gear and more gear and more ads about the gear. the ongoing cannibalism/ consumerism of Politics. Renting out God. Communions of breast of vulture in sauce of rotten teeth and fouled essence of what-can-i-get-from-you. Fuck that. Give me a farm, a community, and a chance at something Higher. Give me minimalism and alchemy. Give me arte povera, a monk's wooden beads, a raspy psalm. Whatever. Give me the eternal, seeded Core.

1.16.10 Sunday morning, a nine mile run with the folks from the WRRC, the 2011 Survival Run. Was a real jackrabbit deal, the nine mile trail twisting back from Carolina Beach State Park into unknown areas where white sand was frosted with morning dew, steep sand-cliffs overlook picture-perfect Cape Fear drifts where lazy sails caught a slow breeze, onward through massive sand dunes with black needles webbing against brown brush (a natural drawing, an environmental happening), running right through the center of a live oak circle, into Sunny Point and the fantastic stretches of woods with complete silence and more sand dunes into the underground brick tunnel of rebar-laced cement, a bunker of busted chards, with lithe, quick steps across graying concrete chunks where shrubs shove out between, then passing through sharp dry grasses, reeds sweep knees, thigh-high with dry-scratch sounds on each piston-push, Marley’s “Hammer” providing the rhythm for the knee lifts (kick on the downbeat) and then 1.4 miles of road to the community center of Kure Beach where everyone congregated for a delicious and voracious breakfast of scrambled eggs & pancakes with coffee.